1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to natural language processing, and more particularly to identifying synonymous expressions of words by considering the similarities between images.
2. Description of the Related Art
The identification of synonymous expressions is one of the most important issues in natural language processing for handling textual data. For example, the expression “windshield” can also be expressed as “windscreen” in English, or as “parabrisas,” “windschutzscheibe,” etc. in other languages. The use of online dictionaries for identifying synonymous expressions is very limited as many expressions are used in a variety of different textual data contexts.
For various applications of natural language processing, including text mining, machine translation, and information retrieval, the identification of synonymous expressions is often important in improving the performance of applications. Because of this, a variety of techniques have been developed for extracting synonymous expressions. However, none of these current techniques are mature enough, and their accuracies are evaluated by checking whether the correct answer is contained within a list of top N candidate expressions rather than whether the answer is correct or not.
One of the limitations of the current techniques is that they only rely on textual information. For example, from a textual data set in the automotive domain, the expressions “door” and “mirror” may be extracted as synonymous expressions of “window” using the current approaches, as they share similar contexts such as “open” and “break.”